Her voice held genuine terror. I did my best to reassure her without offering her cold comfort-I couldn’t promise Josie wasn’t dead, but it seemed hopeful to me that no one had seen her. If she had been assaulted, and by the same people who went after Marcena and Bron, all their bodies would have been found together.
“I’m going to see you tomorrow at practice, right, Julia?”
“Uh, I guess so, Coach.”
“And tell your ma I’m coming over after practice to talk to her. I’ll give you and María Inés a lift home, just this once.”
When I’d hung up, I sat down with a large pad of newsprint and a Magic Marker to write down everything I knew, or thought I knew, about what had been happening in South Chicago.
A lot of lines ran through Rose Dorrado and Billy the Kid. Rose had taken a second job, which upset Josie; the night the plant blew up, the Kid had come to stay at the Dorrados’, running away from his family. Because they objected to Josie? Because of something they were doing themselves? Then there was Billy’s car, but it had Morrell’s flask in it. Somehow, Billy had gotten involved with Bron or Marcena, or both. And Bron had had Billy’s phone in his pocket.
I remembered Josie telling me that Billy had given his phone to someone. To Bron? But why? And then had he given the Miata to Bron so that detectives couldn’t find him through his car? Had Bron been killed by someone who mistook him for Billy? Had Billy really been running away from danger, danger whose seriousness he was too naive to recognize?
The cell phone. What had I done with it. I had a vague memory of the clean-shaven man from Scarface demanding it from me, but I couldn’t remember whether he’d gotten it.
I’d dropped my dirty clothes just inside my door. Billy’s cell phone was still in the jacket pocket. As was Morrell’s thermos, or the thermos that looked like his. I’d handled it so much by now that I doubted it had much forensic value, but I still put it in a plastic bag, and went back down the stairs on slow, stiff legs. It used to be that I could have gone running after twenty-four hours of rest, but these legs were not going running anytime soon that I could imagine.
30 Comrades in Arms
When I returned to Mr. Contreras’s kitchen, I found Conrad had arrived. He was sitting next to Morrell at the chipped enamel table while Mr. Contreras finished flipping a stack of fresh flapjacks for him.
“How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity,” I said.
Conrad grinned at me, his gold tooth glinting. “Don’t think of this as a macho meeting, Ms. W.; you are definitely the star attraction. Tell me, what led you to that pit yesterday?”
“The dog,” I said promptly, adding, as the good nature faded from his face, “no, really: ask Mr. Contreras.”
I explained what had happened, from Rose Dorrado’s call to finding Billy’s Miata under the Skyway, and Mitch’s reappearance west of the river on 100th Street. “Billy knows April Czernin because he knows Josie. And he knows-knew-Bron because Bron drove for the Bysen warehouse on 103rd and Billy knew all the truckers. So I’m wondering if Billy gave Bron his phone, and then his car.”
Conrad nodded. “It could be. Ms. Czernin-she’s one tormented, twisted-up lady. Her girl is sick, I understand, and now she doesn’t know which end is up. I didn’t ask her about the phone, because I didn’t know about it, but she might not have, either: by what she was saying, he didn’t tell her much.”
He took out his cell phone and called down to his charge sergeant to send someone over to the underpass for whatever might be left of the Miata. “And get a really good tracking team to scour the area between Ewing and the river at 100th Street. A PI’s dog picked up the Love woman’s scent down there someplace: it may be where they were attacked.”
When he’d hung up, I produced the thermos. “This was in the front seat, spilling out bourbon.”
“You took that?” Conrad was annoyed. “What the hell you think you’re doing, removing evidence from a crime scene?”
“It looked like the thermos I gave Morrell,” I said. “I didn’t want the bottom-feeders who were taking the car apart to walk off with it.”
Morrell limped over to look at it. “I think it is mine; that’s where the i came off when I was shot at. I told Marcena she could borrow it while she was doing her late-night jaunts-I assumed, somehow, for coffee, not bourbon. Are you impounding it, Rawlings? I want it back.”
“Then you shouldn’t have let her take it to begin with,” I said, and then I remembered her lying in a coma, a quarter of her skin missing, and felt immediately ashamed.
“We’ve been in so many war zones together,” Morrell said. “She’s my comrade-in-arms; you share your stuff with your comrades, Vic. Like it or lump it.”
Conrad looked at me, as if daring me to push one more relationship to the limit. I shook my head and changed the subject, asking who the guy at the helicopter had been.
“Colleague of yours, broadly speaking,” Conrad said.
My forehead wrinkled while I figured it out. “A private eye, you mean?”
“Yep, with Carnifice Security. That was their chopper.”
Not Scarface. Carnifice. The biggest player in the international private security business. They do everything, from kidnap protection in Colombia and Iraq to running private prisons, which is where I first met them-I almost died in their custody a couple of years back.
According to Conrad, someone in the Bysen operation had figured out the same thing I’d told Billy last week-that his cell phone contained a global tracking signal. “The kid’s father got fed up with old Mr. Bysen butting in, going down to that church, whatever it was he did. So the father decided to hire Carnifice to use their tracking equipment to find his kid’s phone, which they traced to the pit. When the gumshoe didn’t find Billy, he wanted to take off again-they hadn’t been hired to save extraneous lives.”
“Thank you, Conrad,” I said awkwardly. “Thank you for showing up, and saving my life, and saving Marcena, too.”
He gave a twisted smile. “We serve and protect, Ms. W., even the undeserving.”
He took out a tape recorder. “Now, the part I need on the record. What was the Love woman doing down on my turf?”
Morrell and I exchanged uneasy glances, but Morrell said, “She was working on a series for an English newspaper. She met Czernin when he came to pick his daughter up from basketball practice. I don’t know what she was doing specifically-she said he was showing her the neighborhood, things behind the scenes she wouldn’t have had access to without him.”
“Such as what?” Conrad demanded.
“I don’t know. She only talked in generalities, about the poverty and housing problems she was learning about.”
“She’s staying with you, right, Morrell? How often was she meeting Czernin?”
“She made a lot of contacts in Chicago -including you, Rawlings-she said you were going to take her on a ride-along this week. She would take off for a day, sometimes more, and I never knew if it was with Czernin or you or some of the other people she was meeting. I didn’t make her sign in and out when she came and went,” Morrell added with bleak humor.
“Did she tell you more?” Conrad turned to me. “You spend a lot of time in that apartment, right?”
I smiled. “That’s right, Commander, but Marcena didn’t confide in me. She did say that Bron let her drive his semi the first night they met, and that she almost took out a shed or something in the school parking lot, but I can’t remember her talking about him more specifically.”
“Ms. Czernin said the Love woman was screwing her husband,” Conrad said.